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Friday, October 10, 2008

Girl arrested for exploiting herself and other lunacies.

In Newark, Ohio a 15-year-old girl has been arrested by police on charges of child pornography. Both the girl and her victim have not been identified but they are one in the same person. Yes, police arrested the girl for sexually exploiting herself because she took a nude photograph of herself.

She has been charged with the “illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material and possession of criminal tools.” I assume the tool was the phone camera used to take the photo. The girl could be imprisoned and force to register as a sex offender. If she is forced to register the on-line listings will simply show that she had produced child pornography leading public readers to assume she had sexually exploited young children. Since being listed on these registries have lead to the murder of various individuals this arrest could eventually put the girl’s life at risk. All because she took a nude photo of herself.

Prosecutors are not finished by any means. The girl in question sent the photo to the phone of a few friends and prosecutors are now considering arresting the other teens for receiving “child pornography”.

Meanwhile the sex hysteria in the UK continues. The school governors of Rokesly Junior School are attempting to prevent nine homes from being built near the school. They argue that the homes will have balconies from which the school playground can be viewed. And therefore the children are at risk from child pornographers.

We’ve all read of cases where there have been examples of parents, families, fathers who are involved with child pornography regardless of whether they have got their own children or not. It’s not acceptable. In particular these days where you’ve got increased zoom lenses on mobile phones that people can take pictures.

Sure Mr. Leskin has some sort of brain lesion or mental deficiency. Let us assume that some child pornographer actually did move into one of the houses. Let us also assume he owned a zoom lens. But how precisely would his taken photos from his balcony create child pornography? The only explanation I can find is if the school has their children running around the playground naked. If that is the case then Mr. Leskin should be answering a few questions.

The obvious absurdity in this is that he equates being able to see a playground with encouraging child pornography. So apparently he thinks all children playing in public are a risk. I presume children should be forced to play behind high walls but with Google satellite photos that could still present a problem. So perhaps they should be play in the dark or be all forced to wear burkas.

The risk posed to children in this case is so minimal as to be almost non-existent. And if some “child pornographer” wanted to look at children he could do so from a public sidewalk. The idea of banning houses from being built on this pretext is daft. Either Mr. Leskin has other reasons for wanting to prevent the building, and is using this as a false pretext, or the man is totally bonkers. His risk assessment is so faulty that it would justify wearing a helmet to protect one from falling space debris.

One of the great problems with panic-induced policy-making is that is foists stupid solutions on the public. Often it does so by imposing policies that either do no good whatsoever, or inflict harm far in excess of any good they may do. The environmental movement loves panic-induced policies because they are keen on proposing lots of bad solutions But this is true for many issues, the panic induced financial bailout that Bush rushed into law is another recent example. We could argue that the drug laws, the Patriot Act, the Iraq war, sex offender registration laws, and a host of other measures are all examples of the sort of bad legislation that comes out fear politics. This is precisely why authoritarians on the Left and the Right love to promote fear campaigns. A panicky populice will sign away precious freedoms without giving it much thought. And what the Left and the Right have in common is they don't want people to think -- just react.

Photo: This photo is not of the girl in question and is only used as an illustration for the article and is not meant to convey any information about this specific case.

Note: We recently posted a mirror-image story similar to this one. In that case a girl took a photo of herself and sent it to a boy unsolicited by him -- but the police arrested the boy. Read it here.